The human heart can suffer from various valvular diseases, which can result in significant malfunctioning of the heart and ultimately require replacement of the native heart valve with an artificial valve. There are a number of known artificial valves and a number of known methods of implanting these artificial valves in humans.
One method of implanting an artificial heart valve in a human patient is via open-chest surgery, during which the patient's heart is stopped and the patient is placed on cardiopulmonary bypass (using a so-called “heart-lung machine”). In one common surgical procedure, the diseased native valve leaflets are excised and a prosthetic valve is sutured to the surrounding tissue at the native valve annulus. Because of the trauma associated with the procedure and the attendant duration of extracorporeal blood circulation, some patients do not survive the surgical procedure or die shortly thereafter. It is well known that the risk to the patient increases with the amount of time required on extracorporeal circulation. Due to these risks, a substantial number of patients with defective native valves are deemed inoperable because their condition is too frail to withstand the procedure.
Because of the drawbacks associated with conventional open-chest surgery, percutaneous and minimally-invasive surgical approaches are in some cases preferred. In one such technique, a prosthetic valve is configured to be implanted in a much less invasive procedure by way of catheterization. For instance, U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,393,360, 7,510,575, and 7,993,394 describe collapsible transcatheter prosthetic heart valves that can be percutaneously introduced in a compressed state on a catheter and expanded to a functional size at the desired position by balloon inflation or by utilization of a self-expanding frame or stent.